Archive for the ‘Rambling’ Category

It’s not like Morpheus is going to hold out his hands to you and say, “Red pill or the blue pill?”

I am sensing a lot of guys are shouting “blue pill”?

Well, there’s work to be done…

I think a lot of people are frustrated, tired, and quit after spending a lot of money but not seeing the result.

Right, you spent a lot of money…

And right, you spent a lot of time…

But then again, answer yourself this, “Did you really do anything?”

Did you get anything going that you can really call “putting an effort”?

I can guarantee that most of the times, people do one thing half-way, and then skip to another thing.

They read about affiliate marketing and jumped on that. But then they heard about pay-per-click, and jumped on that and left the earlier affiliate marketing hanging… then they discovered writing ebooks and thought, “why don’t I write an ebook myself?”

Guess what’s after that?

Yep… writing is too tough. So they went back to PPC and burn more money. Then they heard about outsourcing, and burn more there…

And on, and on…

I am sure you get the idea.

Hmmm… I have an answer to a problem like this…

Let me cut through the B.S… a straight answer on how to make money online (or anywhere).

Step 1: You need an audience…

Step 2: You need to make them an offer…

Alright about Step 1. There’s two ways of going about it. You can gather your own audience, or you can find others who have gathered an audience.

Gathering your own audience is like building a list, a community website (like niche forum, blogging, etc) or anything that brings people to you, which includes traffic generation skills like SEO, PPC or even Bum marketing.

Another way, is by finding others who already have audience.

This is like advertising on other people’s website, ezine, or maybe finding JV partners, etc… you get the idea here, right.

When you have an audience, whether it’s yours or not, you can present them with relate offers.

About that offer, that too can be your own or others. You can create your own product, you can join affiliate programs that offers related product… or here’s another way…

If you gathered your own audience, like when you are blogging or built a forum, or a very popular website, you can sell advertising space…

There’s so many ways to make money online … but what ever it is, it will generally fall in these two steps.

And yes, even when you are selling a service.

Now, what can YOU do to make money online?

Tough question — but I guess a simple answer I can give right now is this — leverage on your strength.

If you have strong focus, attention to detail, won’t get bored easily, you can try SEO or PPC. Those are tough, even when you outsource because it requires attention to details.

If you have money, try out PPC, banner ads, etc. If you don’t have money, learn SEO and bum marketing. And promote affiliate programs like Clickbank, etc…

If you are good with people, you can pickup JV brokering. I am sure there some good courses out there.

If you have technical skills, you can offer services. Put up a website with 1) your sample of work 2) testimonials 3) a form to request for a quote.

Another thing for technical guys, which includes organized people… you can giveaway tools or resources like software or document templates. This can be web templates, business templates, 3D object templates for 3D software, graphic templates, diagrams, charts, etc…

What do you do with that? Giveaway for free and build either a list or a community. Because with good resources or tools, you can build either…

Then you’d have an audience. You know what to do when you have an audience — present them with offers.

If you have great knowledge and experience, and you can write — write an ebook. If a book is too tough for you, then write a short report and sell them cheap. When you sell them cheap and you offer affiliate program with that (maybe using $7 script), you are also building an audience.

Take a look at yourself and see what it is that you are good at the leverage on that to get yourself started.

When you do that, you won’t be jumping around from opportunity to opportunity. Because you must be at least good the things that you are good at, right?

And doing things that you are good at is a breeze…

Stop leaving projects hanging, unfinished…

I had a looked at myself…

Well, what am I good at?

I am good at web design and programming. That’s why most of my projects are related to both or either one of those two.

After giving it some thought, I really feel that we need a forum that talks all about mini-sites. I hope you feel that same way, and help me out with this. A forum is not a forum when it doesn’t have members participating, discussing, debating about topics.

I started one thread, asking members about what they think with me adding this forum. Why don’t you step in and tell me what you think.

You know what, I remember a book I need to read. It’s by Patrick O’keefe (who is a *really* accomplished entrepreneur and webmaster). It’s all about starting, marketing, running a forum. I’ll be reviewing this book soon (plus reading it for my own projects). Just thought I’d share this for now.

Teli Adlam is a friend I know from way back when I was in TurningIdeasIntoDollars.com. She really is a WordPress pro. I can bet that you can ask her anything about WordPress and she’ll have a solid answer for you…

Teli just contacted me that she’s contributing WP Affiliate Guide to the Contest prizes. WP Affiliate Guide consists of guide, videos, private site access to information on how to use wordpress to build affiliate sites.

WordPress really is a great tool and a powerful content management. Of course it requires a little learning curve. But if you can tame this beast, you can really have a great tool to build optimized affiliate sites faster than ever. And the best thing, WordPress can also help you with traffic.

So, the winner of the Mini-Site Design Contest will also get this. On top of that, there’s also the $500 cash prize, 30-Minute Backlinks and Viral Sales Generator.

As you know, I am doing all that I can to promote MiniSiteGallery.com Mini-Site Design Contest. And along that line, I have secured two more prizes from sponsors. These prizes came from Michelle MacPhearson and Peter Koning.

Michelle MacPhearson has contributed her latest product, 30-Minute Backlinks. Selling at $100, this product will show you how to build a massive network of one-way links from high Pagerank sites. All that you need is just 30 minutes. And no technical knowledge is required.

Peter Koning has contributed Viral Sales Generator. Viral Sales Generator is a web software to power the creation and maintenance of a viral membership site. With Viral Sales Generator, you can create a website that offers free memberships, offers one-time offer and reward members for more referrals. What’s great about Viral Sales Generator is its in-depth reporting tool, administration panel and user-friendly member’s panel. Viral Sales Generator is what I use to power my OptinDesign.com.

Alright, I need to get more mini-site templates into this gallery. So I am doing a mini-site design contest. And the late entry date is on 29 February 2008. Mini-site templates submitted after that date will still be included in the gallery, but not for the contest.

After that, I will activate the voting plugin for website visitors to vote for the winner. Last voting date is 31 March 2008. And on 1 April 2008, I will announce the winner.

Recently, I just emailed my list and invited them to join this contest. And I am trying to get more exposure from friends and colleagues too. I also mentioned about sponsorship if anybody is interested. And just this morning, my friend Peter Koning from Viral Sales Generator is contributing a copy of that famous software.

Actually I have been sitting on this for too long already. I registered this domain name sometime last month (December 07). At first I thought it was going to be an easy project. Something that will take no more than a week.

It turns out, it’s been weeks. In case you are wondering, yes, MiniSiteGallery.com is powered by WordPress. And I got the template from Small Potato, Showcase. Actually, it’s meant to showcase websites, but I turned into a mini template download gallery.

Alright, let’s talk more about what MiniSiteGallery.com is.

Sometime last month, I started to have this idea where I wanted to gather and showcase the talents of our mini site designers. There are just so many good designers when it comes to mini sites and ebook covers. I thought that it’ll be a great idea to come to one place and see what these designers can do.

And I was also thinking that there are a number of free download galleries for WordPress, for normal website templates, and the rest, but I have yet to see one that only does mini-sites.

It would be a great place, wouldn’t it?

For mini site designers, now there’s a place to showcase your talent and get exposure. I don’t know of a place where you can do that before. If you are a mini site designers, I know the type of clients that you are looking for. You can submit your designs to other types of gallery, but those galleries gather a different type of audience, which may not be suitable for your business model. No now you can submit your designs here at MiniSiteGallery.com.

And if you are a mini site marketer, somebody who creates and sell ebooks, perhaps you can start looking for your mini site design right here. I encourage designers to submit designs with the e-covers, complete with Photoshop PSD source file. That way, the marketers can just download a design and it will be ready with an ebook cover. All you have to do is just edit a few things and you are almost done.

Along the way, I am hoping to gather some useful marketing strategies for netrepeneurs like you and I. This could be about info product creation, copywriting, list building… what ever that applies.

This is an exciting journey for me. And I hope where ever this leads me, it will be an interesting ride for you too.